his signal indicator held steady at four bars. Over, then, to York Avenue, a notorious strip for subscribers to Sprint and A.T. & T Dozens of pedestrians streamed past with hands held to ears: their friends, it appeared, could hear them. Down in the East Village, the sleuth encountered more of the same. At Second Avenue and Ninth Street, a purported Sprint black hole, he wandered into Star- bucks and asked about service interrup- tions. "I don't have a cell phone, but people talk on their phones in here all the time," an employee said. If it is true, as Bloomberg suggested, that "cell phones don't work exactly at the wrong time," might it also be possible that they do work exactly when you're trying to prove they don't? And th n, finally, a dead zone, on Wall Street just east of Broad. It was tiny; maybe the size of a stretch limo. For sev- eral paces, the phone display read "search- ing for signal," before giving way to two bars, then four again. It was Halloween morning, and on the steps of an Equinox gym, well within the wne, a group in costume-dominatrix cop, men in black lingerie-posed for pictures. "Holy shit! You gotta see this," a passerby said into his StarTac, stop- ping to gawk. "Hello?" He glanced at his phone, then took a few more steps toward Broad Street. "Hello?" Another step and then-back in business-he re- sumed the conversation, shaking his head. "You should've seen. . ." The morning rush abated, and soon, like a ghost, or a puff of wind on a dead day, the wne was gone. -Ben McGrath DEPI OF AMPLIFICATION WHIFF W illiam Shawn, this magazine's ed- itor absolute for a great many years, used to tell his nonfiction writers that the world's worst subJect was the fu- ture. Hard to tie down, the future could too easily come loose and take off on un- expected vectors. While he did not in any way wish to intrude on a writer's sover- eign franchise to think through ideas that 50 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 10, 2003 might occur, it would nonetheless, he felt, be best to avoid the future. Reacting to a proposal of mine, he once slighrly modi- fied his position, informing me that the future was actually the second-worst sub- ject in the world, the worst being the Loch Ness monster. In the twenty-some years that I submitted ideas to him, he did, as it happened, accept two stories that relied on projection into chardess time. The first had to do with a rigid air- ship of novel configuration-a bulbous delta more than a thousand feet long and a thousand feet wide-that was intended to cross oceans carrying vast amounts of freight and then touch down anywhere at all in the least-developed countries of the world, "eliminating the need for roads, railroads, tunnels, bridges, airports, storage facilities, and prepared harbors." Founded by the minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton, New Jerse); the company that meant to build the airship would also build hundreds like it, using lighter-than -air flight to "rev- olutionize missionary aviation." It would be "a Faith Fleet, a Christian Freight Line marked with the insignia of the National Council of Churches, to carry food, goods, and Bibles to people in what the church called the opporturnty coun- tries-fifty transformers to the Voltaic Republic, a hundred thousand Bibles to Nigeria, a million peaches to the Haut- Katanga." The story ran serially in three New Yorkers in February; 1973. For thirty years, the twenty-six-foot prototype whose flight tests the articles described has been hidden under a large black cloth in a T-hangar at a central New Jersey airfield, awaiting further developments. Also in the seventies, I undertook to describe, with Mr. Shawn's faint blessing, a floating nuclear power plant that would produce twenty-three hundred megawatts of electricity and was meant to float 2.8 miles off the New Jersey coast near At- lantic Citr The plant would consist of two state-of-the-art reactors, each in its own hull built by the Newport News Shipbuilding &Dry Dock Company; and protected by a penarmular breakwater that would be the largest structure ever built on earth. The breakvvater's component parts would look like the knucklebones of sheep--eighteen thousand knucklebones made of concrete, and of such magnified size that huge barges would carry them to the site a few at a time. At a facility in Jacksonville, I visited the hulls, which were under construction. Wading around in the University of Floridàs indoor ocean, in Gainesville, I watched a model supertanker being driven onto concrete knucklebones by hurricane waves. At the site off New Jersey; I got good and seasick in a fishing boat fiill of scientists assess- ing future impacts on benthic life. The piece ran in The New Yorker of May 12, 1975. In 1978, the Public Service Elec- tric & Gas Company cancelled its order for the nuclear plant. The accident at Three Mile Island occurred in the fol- lOWIng year, reducing toward zero the appeal of floating fission. And now the United States GoJI As- sociation has announced that it is not, after all, going to move its museum from Far Hills, New Jersey; to the site of the old Russian Tea Room, on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, a plan I described in The New Yorker of March 31, 2003. The U.S.G.A. bought the Tea Room scarcely a year ago, and began to design space in its six stories for Iron Byron, the robot goJIer, the :films of Bobby Jones teaching the game to W. C. Fields, the club that Alan Shepard swung on the moon, and thousands of other items. The U.S.G.A. was unaware, however, that museums in the State of New York are subject to the oversight of the New York Board of Regents and are required to have boards of trustees independent of parent organizations. Seeking no such caddie, the U.S.G.A. prefers to call its own shots. There was a cost overrun, too: ' t the same time, it became clear that ex- tensive renovations-including the addi- tion of a seventh floor-would have been necessary to create the type of world- class facility that the U.S.G.A. sought to establish. Such work would have esca- lated the total expense of the project to a level that the Association felt was in- appropriate." Tea Room For Sale. Three swings at the future. Three consistent whiffs. Mr. Shawn may have had a point. Mr. Shawn seems to have had such a cogent point that it has set me feverishly to work. Abandoning all un- finished projects set in the near, middle, and deep past, I intend to complete as soon as I can-certainly in this autumn of 2003-a detailed description, in the future definite, of the second Adminis- tration of George W. Bush. -John McPhee